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Norman Mailer Quotes about War

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Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

Norman Mailer
War, Support, Reason
"Mr. Mailer Concludes". Interview with Zachary Klein, zacharykleinonline.com. July 29, 2013.

For 40 years we were led to think of the Russians as godless, materialistic and an evil empire. When the Cold War ended, we suddenly discovered that Russia was a poor Third World country. They had not been equipped to take over the world. In fact, they were just trying to improve a miserable standard of oppressive living, and couldn't. They had to spend too much on arms build-up. We didn't win the Cold War; we bankrupted the Russians. In effect, it was a big bank exhausting the reserves of a smaller one.

Norman Mailer
Country, War, Winning

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

Norman Mailer
Weed, War, Marijuana
Interview in "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series" edited by George Plimpton, 1967.

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

Norman Mailer
Children, Real, War

One of the reasons the English got through all their falls and the loss of their empire, all their disasters, their strikes, their difficulties, their wars through the years was they had Shakespeare to fall back on. And they speak well in England.

Norman Mailer
War, Fall, Loss
Source: www.foxnews.com

We have an absolute right in a democracy to argue about a war.

Norman Mailer
War, Democracy, Arguing
Source: www.foxnews.com

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Norman Mailer
War, Blessing, Boredom
Norman Mailer (2003). “The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing”, p.164, Random House

Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself.

Norman Mailer
Running, War, Writing

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

Norman Mailer
War, Boredom, Existence
Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon (1988). “Conversations with Norman Mailer”, p.93, Univ. Press of Mississippi

What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer - war, and the preparations for new war.

Norman Mailer
War, Preparation, Answers
"Barbary Shore". Book by Norman Mailer, 1951.

A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.

Norman Mailer
War, Fighting, Army
Norman Mailer (2013). “The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author”, p.174, Henry Holt and Company

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.

Norman Mailer
War, Winning, Race

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

Norman Mailer
Military, War, Moving
Norman Mailer (1972). “Existential errands”, Signet

The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.

Norman Mailer
Stars, War, Men
Norman Mailer (1970). “Of A Fire On The Moon”

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